Pat McCrory in the context of elite overproduction.

As we head into the fourth week of Pat McCrory's failure to conceeed in
the NC gubernatorial race, it's important to look at McCrory's infantile
behavior in a larger context. While it would be tempting to try to
psychoanalyze his continued intransigence as yet another man-child temper
tantrum, there are larger forces at work, of which McCrory is just one
sad symptom.

The root of the problem stems from the ever widening wealth gap and
subsequent elite
overproduction. As more and more millionaires and billionaires are
minted they seek to convert their newfound wealth into political power.
But the levers of power are limited, there's a finite number of House and
Senate seats, there are only 50 governors, and only one President. No
new power levers are being created, yet there are more and more people
scrambling for them. More and more millionaires think they should be on
the city council or run for their state legislature, while more
billionaires think they too should be President. In a simple example of
the law of supply and demand, you can see the price of running for office
rising steeply over the last 40 years, with the cost of
running for President exceeding $2 billion in 2012.

But what happens when the demand outstrips the supply so that no manner
of money can buy you that cherished lever of power? When there are
multiple millionaires, each backed by a group of billionaires, all vying
for power? What do you pay then? You pay in social norms. Common decency. The
destruction of these are the price you pay. Pat McCrory, in a desperate
bid to retain his power, is willing to violate every norm of U.S.
democracy and attempt to destroy all faith in the election process, the
same process that put him in power four years ago. If Pat McCrory can't be
governor, well then, he might as well burn down the entire edifice so no
one else can be either.

You can also see this playing out on the national stage, with Donald Trump
willing to violate every norm, digging deep into the veins of xenophobia,
racism, and bigotry to propel himself into office. Under normal
circumstances no politician would openly court the worse side of the human
tribal instinct, the horrors from the last rise of fascism leading up to
WWII have been too close and too fresh in memory. But time has passed, the
last survivors of WWII are dying out, the reality of tens of millions of
people dying in wars, revolutions, and pogroms are just dry history
lessons now, not to be considered in the raw and ugly scramble for power.

So don't blame Pat McCrory, as infantile and destructive as his behavior
has become, he is just a symptom of a much larger breakdown in political
norms, and these are just a couple steps along a longer arc of societal
disintegration. We're already seeing the normal U.S. two-party system
fragment into five distinct parties; the neo-liberal wing of the
Democratic party as exemplified by Hillary Clinton, the populist wing of
Bernie Sanders followers, the traditional big business GOP, the Tea Party
republicans, and finally the Trumpers. And this isn't the end of the
disruption, merely the beginning. Layer on global warming, the continued
disruption of technology, and the world wide migration of people from
rural areas into cities and we have all the ingredients for massive
upheaval. Will we descend into our own Cultural Revolution, shatter the
country in another Civil War, or will the similar rise of fascism across
Europe lead to another world engulfing spasm of death and desctruction?
The
patterns are all there, the roots of the problem can be clearly mapped
out, and while there's no guaranteed way to avoid the coming
disintegration, maybe we should at least try.